I wrote for The Christian Century about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Alice Neel retrospective. The exhibition features over a dozen portraits of women and children, and I write about Neel’s place in the history of paintings of mothers:
“These paintings, rendered through a woman’s gaze, complicate and deepen the feminine ideal I observed in religious art, advocating for those doing mother work by painting maternal experience in all of its nuance and variety.”
The Spanish Family (1943). Below: Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978). (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Gift of Barbara Lee, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women / © The Estate of Alice Neel)